I ASSIGNED THAT "YOGA CLASS" PIECE AND HERE'S WHY

Since xoJane published this piece yesterday we have received a lot of feedback and speculation on why we published it. It has been suggested by some that we were motivated by pageviews, and that we don't care about our readers and contributors of color.

As the assigning editor, I'd like to respond to some of the criticism.

Because there are a lot of things that I don't give a about -- pageviews among them -- but the one thing that I give a huge about is race, and the conversations surrounding race.

Throughout my life as a person, a black woman, a writer and editor, author, mother, daughter, partner and friend, it has always been an integral part of my existence to listen and question, invite and engage in dialogs about race. How can we look at issues surrounding race, racism, cultural appropriation and race consciousness in nuanced, unprecedented ways that will help move not merely the conversation, but the actual systemic foothold of the segregationist, tribal thinking that hurts and hinders the growth and emotional health of both black and white Americans alike.

There is so much work to do on this issue that sometimes it can be difficult to discern between the astute opportunities to engage and the knee-jerk impulses to include all voices, raw and unedited, with the sincere hope that the inclusion will open up an as-yet-unexplored aspect of this byzantine beast of race in America.

Such was the case when after running into Jen, the author of the original post, who I know from my Brooklyn neighborhood. She shared with me in casual conversation her experience of being in her yoga class and suddenly realizing the impact of her white privilege in reaction to a black woman in the class who appeared to be uncomfortable, and I asked her to write about it.

As she described the scenario, it rang familiar to me. Real familiar. And I was reminded of an experience I had when I was in college.

During one spring break I went to Florida with a white girlfriend and several of her white friends, all of whom came from wealthy families, were blonde and thin and almost prodigiously pleased with their body privilege, without any real awareness of its impact, or that addressing me as "Hey curvy," would be offensive to me.

I am not a big girl, but I am curvy, and the way they so freely referred to me as curvy by default because I'm black, all while lounging in their bikinis, sure, I felt resentful. And angry, and invisible. Maybe the black woman in Jen's yoga class felt that way too, or maybe she didn't, but the fact that Jen was willingly offering up this explicit admittance of her white privilege struck me as valuable in some way. At the very least, a good jump-off point.

Those of us who write about race in the media, and who are race conscious, are often expressing our frustration over unaccounted for white privilege, or the rampant cultural appropriation that goes on constantly. Mostly we hear privilege couched in this way: "I know that black people are disadvantaged, but that doesn't mean that I as a white person am at an advantage because of it."

But actually, it does. The white girls in Florida and Jen are at an advantage when they may decide, unknowingly or otherwise, to use their privilege to make assumptions about how one individual black woman feels about her body in whatever environment.

I truly did not anticipate the response we have received from xoJane readers and commenters, or from media colleagues who I admire and respect. There have been some really excellent responses, though,including Pia Glenn's on the site today. And in reading her piece as well as the comments and Twitter threads about the original post, I am compelled to think more deeply about my own intentions in publishing it, and its effect.

After taking a step back, halfway through my fourth week as an editor at xoJane, I realized that in all likelihood if I were a reader who hadn't had the initial conversation with Jen and knew the background and context of the story, I would have been equally as offended as the most critical commenters. Because I SHOULD have asked Jen to do more work and questioning before writing about her experience. Instead, I read it too quickly before running it by only one other editor at xoJane, and published it without giving a thorough enough consideration to the response of the xoJane community, and readers at large.

One of the main tenets of my writing and work surrounding race is that I want people to understand that these conversations and racism itself can actually hurt people’s feelings. And I don’t want people to be hurt. Not readers, not Jen, and not the xoJane community, who I have learned is spirited, impassioned and tough as nails. I hope I can better serve you with more carefully provocative pieces in the future, and that you will hang in with me as I figure out the right tenor moving forward.

And bishes like this is exactly why if I get offered a job I recently interviewed for I will be declining it. The looks whose YT women were giving me read "she's smart, pretty and qualified? oh hell no" The only black people I saw were the cleaning ladies...

Giiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiirl, if you don't take that job offer and show your beautiful competent ass in that there workplace for all to see Harriet Tubman gonna visit you in your sleep.

And it won't be pleasant.

Harriet Tubman, for real lol That's not the only reason why I'm not going to take it if they offer it to me. It's in a no man's land town and I already live in an area like that so I'm not trying to be out there surrounded by no family/friends. If the same job was in a bigger city I'd take it though

I don't even feel sorry for the black editor smh this is the white piece of sh*t's 'fauxpology'

The piece was deeply tactless, problematic, and self-centered, and I am to blame for that. I am sorry.

I would like to share, however, that I am friendly with Rebecca Carroll, the managing editor of xoJane, which is how the piece came about in the first place. I talked with her about my experience in a yoga class a few days after it happened, not because she is a black woman but because she is a race writer and has engaged me several times in conversations about racial revelations in her own life. She encouraged me to write the story for xoJane, despite my anxieties about how problematic of a standpoint it is and how people might react. She reassured me that the fact that I was having these thoughts at all, problematic as they may be, was a good thing and something worth sharing. I trusted her to be sensitive to the xoJane readership and the ways in which the piece might be perceived. I thought, as she said, that it might be productive. Obviously that was inexcusably ignorant of me.

After repeated requests on her behalf for the story, I sent her what I believed was a fairly rough draft of the piece, reassured by her that it would be edited into something more coherent. It was published almost completely untouched.I'm horrified that what I had intended to be an acknowledgment of my own privilege and complicity in a system that I perceive to be skewed has turned into this. My hope is that Rebecca will give a more detailed explanation of what she had anticipated that soliciting the piece would generate. I can make no excuses for what I've written and feel deeply apologetic and embarrassed for all the negativity that I've generated.

lol re her explanation...she didn't have an experience, she saw a black person...I'd bet the farm that she's been in situations where there was only one-two black ppl in the room dozens, if not, hundreds of times so why does it hit now? Bc she was so disgusted by the black woman's body that she couldn't wrap her head around the bw being confident enough to walk her lone black ass into the class.

^^^ Exactly. Yt women usually feel extremely threatened and uncomfortable around a shapely black woman. They just don't know how to react.

Most clear women are fearful we will steal their husbands, just like back in the day when their men weren't giving them any, they used to sneak into the slave pit and give their sexual attention to black women. It's in their genetics..if i recall the gene 'jal-2-ous'.

So the backlash was way too much for xojane to handle. They changed her name and removed her picture. But here she is (thanks google cache):Jen Polachek is her name. But on xojane they changed it to Jen Caron and removed her picture from their site. People are going in and dragging her on multiple forums and response articles have been written. This is the enlightened racist:

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